Friday essay: ‘mourning cannot be an endpoint’ – James Bradley on living in an Age of Emergency
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Friday, April 5, 2024
Calamity, Temperature, Friends, Coral reef, Convulsion, COVID, Hamish Hamilton, Grief, Face, Survival, Heat, Bleeding, Beauty, Incidence, Coral, Empathy, Crash, American frontier, Stroke, Hospital, United Nations, History, Turtle, Smoke, Dengue fever, Death, Record, Fishery, Hope, Life, Flood, Thought, City, Social theory, Malaria, Plastic, Arctic Circle, Love, Fire, Breeding, Cognitive dissonance, Mourning, Movement, Sadness, Courage, Violence, Heat wave, Weather, Agriculture
Although it is early, the day is already unseasonably warm, the sky hazy with smoke from hazard-reduction burns to the south and north of the city.
Key Points:
- Although it is early, the day is already unseasonably warm, the sky hazy with smoke from hazard-reduction burns to the south and north of the city.
- Walking to the water’s edge I wade out and dive, then stroke outwards until my breath gives out and I surface with a gasp.
- There is something very particular about looking back towards the shore from deeper water.
- Amid the convulsions of COVID, a hastening wave of calamity has made it clear that the first stages of climate breakdown are upon us.
- Food production will decline markedly, especially in regions such as sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia and Central and South America.
- Warming and acidifying waters will severely impact the fisheries that provide one-third of the world with their principal source of protein.
A shift
- Attempting to comprehend its immensity and fluid multiplicity alters us, making it possible to glimpse new continuities and connections.
- As the late Sven Lindqvist observes in his interrogation of the racist and genocidal foundations of European imperialism, “It is not knowledge we lack.
- It is the courage to understand what we know and draw conclusions.” In other words, the path through involves more than just a shift in energy sources.
- It begins in a reckoning with the past, and demands a far more fundamental reorganisation of the global economy, a shift to a model that operates within planetary boundaries and shares resources for the benefit of all.
- Such a shift is not impossible.
Beauty and astonishment
- How do we make sense of the disappearance of coral reefs, of dying kelp and collapsing ecosystems?
- How do we imagine a world in which the massing life that once inhabited not just the oceans but the earth and the sky is largely gone?
- More than that, however, the act of openness creates the possibility of love and joy and – improbably – wonder.
- However much has been lost, the world still hums with beauty and astonishment.
- No less importantly, it is to recognise that despair is also a form of turning away.
- Yet, like the scientists working to save coral reefs, he said he did not know what else he could do.
- Instead, grief must be part of a larger recognition that there is no longer any way back, that the only route now is forward.
- Surviving it demands we build a world that treats everybody – human and non-human – as worthy of life and possibility.
- I turn to look out to the horizon, its fading margin between sea and sky a space of grief, but also possibility.
- This is an edited extract from Deep Water: the world in the ocean by James Bradley (Hamish Hamilton).
James Bradley was the recipient of the Copyright Agency Non-Fiction Fellowship for 2020.